Don’t Marry Old Captains

if you find yourself with a man who wears his anger like a bruise
left long ago by his stepfather’s fist
and his first wife’s infidelities

I suggest you take every loving piece of you that wants to help him heal
and run
don’t walk

Every fragment of your being
will pay the price
for those ghosts

Your friends will warn you
The doctors will tell you to leave
You show up at your mother’s door
whom you haven’t spoken to in a year
begging her to tell you how to be a wife to a man so mad.
She will look at you wide-eyed and sad
knowing she did not raise her daughter to join
the waves of women
who have learned to keep their mouths shut

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You will become a shadow of who you once were
trying to show him how big love is while he slams doors and yells
that he’s never had a good wife
and just how miserable you make him

If there is a sound when the spirit breaks, you hear it now

His teenage son sits feet away whispering to you how sorry he is
for his father
and you start to see the bruise appear on him too
another generation of inherited anger
that swore
they’d ‘never be like him’